A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  Graham is packed and ready to go. I am sorry to see them leave. Both the guinea pig, and my sister.

  I go back to the kitchen and lift up my porcelain plate and drop it into the bin. I hear it break against the last broken plate I dropped in there.

  I go to the living room and sit at the table where the hutch sat and finger Graham’s paper hats. I remember how every picture and every sculpture I ever made died at the very moment I finished it.

  I finger Graham’s paper hats. I think about all the dead things I’ve made.

  8

  Hare

  From the sun room radio, an expert is telling me that there is poison in my water.

  My pipes are made of lead, he says, and so, every day, I am drinking it. But how can I not have noticed that I’m being poisoned? Because it will take years and years, the expert says, before all this lead I drink actually begins to harm me. It is building in my blood, but only very slowly. And so, of course, I did know this after all: that I am, slowly, being killed.

  From the sun room radio, the newscaster is telling me that a body has been found in a suitcase in the Grand Canal, but that the Gardai are unable to distinguish whether the person was a woman or a man, old or young, black or white or some colour in-between.

  I am digging.

  Crouched beside a sand heap on the outskirts of the dunes. Back to the sun. Shoulder caps reddening. Fine hairs at my temples yellowing. But as fast as I am able to dig, the sand caves in and refills my hole. I make a clearing, pushing back the dry top layer of grains which cover the beach. If I am to stand a chance, I must set a pace of emptying faster than it refills. I must begin wide and delve narrow. Why is my hole against me? Even my hole.

  I drove to the beach this afternoon. A perfectly reasonable thing for a perfectly reasonable person to do on a fine day in summer. I parked the car and walked as far as I could walk from all the perfectly reasonable people on the beach.

  The tide is out, and I’m not sure whether or not my way back will be cut off once it comes in again. My grandmother would be proud.

  In the dark, coarse, cold, firm layer, the sand starts to hold itself up alone and I am able to make progress. My mother used to tell me that if I dug down deep enough, eventually I’d arrive in Australia. ‘It’s right down through the middle of the Earth,’ she’d say, ‘and directly out the other side.’ When I was a child, I believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny until I was embarrassingly old. I believed that nougat was made out of old chewing gum, that teabags were filled with dried and minced cowpats, that telegraph poles were God’s discarded toothpicks. And so, I saw no reason to question this shortcut to Australia.

  Now I am down as deep as the length of my digging arm and I’m not sure I can reach any further. Every time I plunge, my cheek rests a second against the surface of the beach, adding extra grains to my lopsided sand beard. Every time I raise my head, I check the tide hasn’t barred my way. I check my Fiesta is still waiting for me beyond the dunes. And I check the old man in the sea, the solitary old man.

  No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they’re already there, and I followed them, unwittingly. His wrinkled and bronzed paunch is bared to the ocean and he is wading-swimming his way along the length of the strand and back again, seemingly unruffled by the freezing water, the burgundy balls of bladderwrack bumping beneath the surface, the plague of transparent jellyfish. The water is shallow. The old man’s knees must be grazing the seabed as he kicks his legs, and when he stands to wade again, his trunks drag precipitously low on his hips with the weight of their wetness. The curls on his chest are fiercely white against his tanned skin, and every now and again, I see the old man checking on me too.

  I suppose I pictured that, in Australia, I’d pop out through a trapdoor in the sky, spot the crowns of koalas’ heads swaying in the topmost branches of the gum trees and hear the distant whingeing of didgeridoos. Then I’d drop down, landing squarely with the bush on one side and the beach on the other and Alf and Irene from Home and Away waiting to welcome me. My child imagination had it all nicely rationalised, until, one day, I stopped to study a diagram of a cross-section of the Earth in my geography book. The molten rock, the blazing magma, the fiery core.

  Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.

  The sky grows overcast. Even though it’s still warm and dry, the crowd by the car park begins to dwindle. In this country where the sun shines so infrequently, I find it strange that most reasonable people remain so fussy. That they leave with the arrival of the first cloud, thinking they’ll return on a sunnier day which is unlikely to ever come. That they expect so much from life and will not compromise.

  I am digging.

  Until I can dig no further. Creeping forward only to be gently wrenched back. Until there is nothing but dark and rock.

  I withdraw my arm and clamber into my hole and stand. I stand in my hole and pretend to be a dwarf. Now the wading-swimming man and I check one another at exactly the same moment. He registers my dwarf and looks away. I climb out and begin a new hole.

  Works about Digging, I test myself: in 2007, Urs Fischer had the floor of Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York’s West Village dug up and out. Drilled, torn, removed. Leaving only dry dirt and rubble, a sign by the entrance warning that the installation was dangerous to the point of risk of death. The title of the piece is baffling: You. But who was this ‘you’? Somebody who, the artist felt, imperilled his solid grounding, even his life? And now I wonder did he get his secret message across; now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

  Five holes later, each an exact arm’s length deep, I realise there’s someone standing over me. A woman in sunglasses and a baseball cap. I’ve no idea how long she’s been there because there is no sun to cast a shadow. ‘Excuse me,’ she pipes up, ‘what are you doing?’

  I brush my yellowed hair from my eyes, scratch my sand beard. ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m digging holes.’

  ‘I just don’t think it’s appropriate,’ she says. ‘What if my children were to come running down here to play? And trip into one of your holes? And break an ankle?’

  ‘A knee.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Well, unless your children are unnaturally tall, I expect a knee is what they’d break.’

  Her expression is astonishment, and then, disgust. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says.

  ‘Wrong?’ I get up from my knees and climb out. ‘Just because I don’t give a shit about your children doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.’

  The woman begins to back off. I watch her watching her footing as she goes, picking between my ankle-breaking holes, back along the beach to her windbreak and her picnic rug and her precious, breakable children. I stand up and shout into the wind: ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONGNESS ANYWAY?!’

  Works about Wrongness, I test myself: Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, 1996. A tall-as-man circular wall painting cut through its core with the sentence: EVERYTHING IS WRONG.

  A gull the size of an albatross soars overhead, screeches. A bee emerges uncertainly from the dunes and commits suicide in the slosh of my inaugural hole. My mother says there are twenty different species of bee in Ireland, but that the average person divides them into only two: bumble and honey.

  I gaze out at the blue and vast. My mother says that every seventh wave is supposed to be large. In the same way as a succession of shallow breaths necessitates a deep one. As if the sea is breathing as well as counting.

  But today, there’s something the matter with it. The tide goes out and out and out, when surely it ought to have turned around again by now.

  Maybe it isn’t going to come back this time.

  A world without sea.

  I think about how this wide
openness is the view I love best, and yet, if I was out there, how quickly it would kill me.

  Drive again, home again. I can feel the grains in my socks and sleeves and pants sandpapering my sunburn. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and lift my T-shirt and twist about. I see how my shoulder caps and a patch of skin at the top of my back and back of my neck is shocking pink. Fluorescent.

  I remember a thing I used to do as a child after a day at the seaside. I’d drop my chin, stick out my tongue to lick my chest and taste the salt on my skin. I used to wait until I was home again in the bathroom or my bedroom and alone, as if there were something indecent about it, in the way that children are able to sense indecency, without fully understanding.

  I stand on my grandmother’s carpet. Alone in her bathroom, alone in her house, alone on the summit of turbine hill. I drop chin to chest, stick out my tongue and taste the flavour of sea on skin, relish it. I close my eyes and wish I’d stayed there on the shore’s edge in front of the wide openness. And dug all my holes into one, and given myself a pirate’s burial.

  I go to my grandmother’s room and lie down in the place where the bed borrowed from the hospice had been before a man came to reclaim it. I lower my cheek to the floor. My eyes fill as my head falls.

  People are most likely to die in bed; I suppose I heard somewhere. But what bed? At home in their own, or in a hospice? Or maybe, like my grandmother, at home in a hospice bed?

  Now I wonder how many more people have died in that borrowed bed since my grandmother.

  On this carpet, again I remember the old one. Its cider-shade and the tin soldier who lived beneath and how he used to drum on his furniture. He was quite brilliant at it. With only his hands and domestic surfaces, he drummed up an endless variety of rhythms, and it wasn’t even annoying; it was curiously lovely. What bothered me was that he was the one who was supposed to have purpose; purpose enough for both of us. What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.

  It was forty-four wooden spoons long, my bedsit. Even though I kept a steel ruler in the desk-tidy on my tabletop, I insisted on measuring the length of my bedsit in wooden spoons, and spoon by spoon, from the old fireplace across the tacked-down lino, as I measured, I saw how filthy my floor was, and I found a toy car with the figure of a tiny man inside, a thing that didn’t belong to me and that I’d never seen before.

  I suppose that must have been shortly before I momentously phoned my mother, but I can’t remember for sure. I can’t remember what happened to the toy car and toy driver either. Did they get left behind, again?

  When I first arrived here, it was morning, and my grandmother’s bungalow shimmered with healing potential. It wasn’t until after the sun set on my first night that I noticed the signs of decrepitude, as if, in daylight, weathered objects are inexplicably repaired: fissures resealed, colours reconstituted. All afternoon I’d been distracted by the process and possibility of the move. It wasn’t until my belongings had been put away that I’d looked—really looked—and registered: the mould on the weighing scales scoop, the chopping board, the table legs. The webs in the window frames so thick you could have called them hammocks and cradled kittens there. The stench of abandonment.

  On the radio, gardai and pathologists are piecing together a little bit more of the suitcase body every day. Now they say it is a man, white and young. They are appealing for information.

  Check your wardrobe for suitcases. Your life for the space a young white man used to take up.

  At the beginning, I refused to acknowledge the decrepitude. Because this phase of my life was supposed to be new; I was supposed to be rejuvenated. But as the weeks pass, even the things which initially seemed intact have revealed themselves to be faulty. The knobs dropped off the cooker; now I’m down to the last one. I have to cook either all in the same pot or in rotation, or sometimes I use a pair of pliers to force the metal spike beneath the broken knob. Then there’s the beautiful old armchair where I sit in the evening to read. It was part of a suite, every other part of which is missing, and I couldn’t understand, at first, why it had been overlooked, until one night I lifted the throw-blanket draped across and found the place where Joe used to scratch his back: an ineradicable black stain from the grease of his coat.

  The first night I spent here, I sat up until dawn in the dog-stained armchair. As surely as the sun had set and the decay shown itself, at the moment I stopped shifting about, the house started to shift instead, to creak and clunk and squeak and twitch. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I believe utterly in robbers and rapists and murderers, in those who make the scrutiny of defenceless people their specialist subject. So I sat up in the armchair until dawn. Then I moved to the floor of my grandmother’s bedroom and lay down there, as I am lying here now.

  I need you at this moment, more than I ever did when you were alive, I implore my gone grandmother. If you come now I promise I won’t ever ask again.

  And I remember that this is something I used to say to God, back when I thought there might still be a chance he existed.

  And my grandmother doesn’t come, just like God didn’t.

  Works about Ghosts, I test myself: James Lee Byars, 1969. An empty room, except for the audience, a bewildered audience. The title of the artwork: This is a Call from the Ghost of James Lee Byars.

  ‘I write the world’s simplest poems,’ the artist said, and I transcribed it in black ink and capital letters to the back of my left hand, and watched as it washed away, letter by letter.

  The summer days continue to arrive in spite of my indifference to them. If I was my sun, I doubt I’d bother to rise and fall so incessantly with such scant acknowledgement. But then nature acknowledges it, of course. Everything leafing, blooming, bushing, teeming. The redcurrant bushes fruit and the fruit falls and gets scoffed by the rats and bugs. The baby birds learn to fly and fledge and fuck off. Only the air is dead and so only the turbine is on my side. Its somnolent blades barely managing to turn.

  I lie on my back in my wilderness, watching the grass blades erupting into feathers above me. I remember how, when I lived in the city, I used to hear strangers sneezing in the distance. Now there are only the farmer’s recently weaned calves in the field which wraps around my grandmother’s property. They bawl and bawl, which is infinitely worse than sneezing. Sometimes, when I am not gazing at the grass stalks, I gaze at the dip in the garden step and contemplate all the footfalls it took to wear, and I find my grandmother in that dip. Or I gaze at the same spot in the sky; I wait for something to pass through it.

  Today, a lone goose, gently honking. A honk for each flap, like a lorry reversing. Mindful of others, issuing a gentle warning. I watch the patch the lone goose intersected until the sun reaches it. Reducing the blue and cloud to stars and flashes, forcing me to close my eyes.

  I do almost nothing, just barely enough to keep myself from turning to stone. I perform only the most necessary tasks at the basest level of involvement. Shower without soaping, eat without cooking, read without concentrating. I still go out and cycle, but only just. I push the pedals down and down and down. They push themselves back up again. I don’t take my camera. I don’t look for dead things and when I find them anyway I cycle past and leave them there.

  I miss rats and rabbits; I miss a hare.

  I go to my bags and boxes in the spare room, the ones I have not unpacked yet. I turn them out onto the carpet. In the last—always the last—I find it.

  The toy car which doesn’t belong to me, but which I didn’t leave behind.

  I tell myself that so long as I eat and sleep and wash and cycle and talk on the phone every other evening in an emotionally stable tone of voice, on emotionally stable subject matter, then she will not notice how nearly killed I am.

  But of course she does; she is my mother.

  Mum in summer, when I was a child. Because the f
amine hospital is at a crossroads, it marked a logical meeting point for the neighbouring children. On sunny days there would always be several of us frolicking in the rockery, clambering the straggled pines, sploshing in the paddling pool. It was during summer that Jane and I realised our mother was less motherly than the others’ mothers, and this was a great blessing. She’d ignore our amateur acrobatics on the swing-set, our tendency to turn the guinea pigs loose and chase them. She’d drive us to the beach and carry all the seaside paraphernalia herself, the cool box and windbreak and picnic basket. Rubber rings, bodyboards, rug. She’d even buy us all ice lollies on the drive home.

  The swing-set acrobatics, as precarious as I imagine they appeared, had been carefully devised. They began the summer of the Barcelona Olympics, after Jane and I became obsessed with watching the gymnastics. The Americans who always cried and the Russians who always won and the Chinese who never had any boobs. The rules of our contest were more concerned with landing than swinging or leaping. The object was to hit the ground with arms out straight and feet planted evenly apart. We often twisted ankles or got kicked in the head, but were not discouraged. Because it was quite challenging to accomplish a perfect land, we remained interested; we continued to play.

  Like all the best games, it was pointless and difficult.

  Like all the best games, it was about pretending to fly.

  What does my mother do in summer now? She goes to work. But what about the other days? I’ve no idea. I never ask.

  ‘HOW ARE YOU?’ I shout down the phone this evening when she calls. ‘What did you do today? What’s that noise?’ She’s on her mobile at a classic car rally in a seaside town with my father and his vintage Jensen. In the background, I can hear bandstand music.